Category: Women’s Stories

Abortion is hard even for women who feel they made the right decision. This testimony from a book by a pro-choice author illustrates the feelings some women have:

“I had an abortion when I was 17. It was illegal then, so my parents took me to Mexico. The memories were painful. But I never talked about them.

When I was 22 I had an abortion, part of the ending of a marriage. It was still illegal in Arizona, so I went to California…

At 26, a second marriage ended with my third abortion. It was now legal in Arizona, so I didn’t have to run away. It was neat, clean, and fast. I woke from the anesthetic sobbing. The nurse, trying to comfort me, repeated, “It’s all right, dear. It’s over. It’s over.” I knew – that’s why I cried. But I didn’t talk about it.

The American psychological Association announced recently that “most women who have abortions experience a sense of relief,” rather than “any lasting psychological trauma.” I felt that relief – every time.

I got on with my life, as everyone around me advised…

For so many years – I resisted – thinking about the abortions. It always hurt too much. After the first one, I would count years by their ages. I’d imagine how old each child would’ve been that year. After the second, after the third, it became too difficult to carry their ages. I knew it was hurting thing to do. I accepted the abortions as done, as choices, awful choices, between fire and ice, between rocks and hard places… No one told me that a woman, a girl, who chooses to enter pregnancy has the right to mourn. I thought that since I have chosen abortion, I had given up that right.”

Ruth Colker Abortion and Dialogue: Pro-Choice, Pro-Life, and American Law (Bloomington: Indiana University press, 1992) X IV

Women deserve better than abortion.

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A POST ABORTIVE MOTHER’S RESPONSE TO THE “I HAD AN ABORTION T-SHIRT” Stand true pro-life outreach

“Today I came across a pro-abortion image that made my skin crawl. There was no blood, no little aborted baby parts, no image of death. Instead it was a photo of Gloria Steinem, smiling, arms raised in a celebratory pose, wearing a t-shirt that read, “I had an abortion.” Beneath her it asked, “Do you really need to inconvenience yourself for the next 18 years?”….

As a post-abortive mother of four, this infuriated and disgusted me on many different levels…..

There was a time in my early 20s when all I wanted was to get pregnant and have a child. Desperately. I would practically DARE my boyfriend, and alternately BEG him to begin our little family. Why then, when I finally conceived my first child, was I so easily convinced to “take care of it”? I don’t have an answer. I can say with certainty that if he had reacted with “That’s great news! We’re going to have a family!” that I would have kept the child. Never did I feel like this was my body and my decision. It was us and our decision and he decided that abortion was the answer and I didn’t argue. The very night of the procedure I drank all of the whiskey I could find and I did that for most of the nights following for several months. I wanted to leave the country. I wanted therapy. I wanted to die. I wanted, more than anything in the world, to be INCONVENIENCED FOR THE NEXT 18 YEARS. But I chose not to be inconvenienced, to have my uterine contents removed, to spend the next several years suffering from my decision. Now as I stand on the sidewalk in front of Charlotte’s abortion mills, I am joined by friends who are unable to conceive. How must they feel, longing for a child, watching a woman who chooses convenience over a lifetime of love?”

Read the entire testimony here.

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From one woman who had an abortion:

“You could hear crying in the holding room… crying of women who already had the abortion. I remember the sounds, the smells, the suction… You could hear the sound of the motor of the pump, the suction when the baby was being withdrawn, the clinking of the utensils.… [She recalls] this hurts so bad [and then thought] this is what I get, of course it’s going to hurt… Look what I’m doing… I just remember the crying… So many people crying.”

Only her husband and eldest son know about her two abortions which he had in high school. At the time of the quote, she was 35.

James D Slack Abortion, Execution, and the Consequences of Taking Life (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009) 67

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A pro-life blog quoted this abortion story:

“I was anxious, tired and starting to feel the symptoms of my pregnancy. I started having second thoughts, but I fought them off. I worked late to get things off of my mind, but I was 95% sure that I wanted to go through with this. To me this felt like a ball and chain weighing me down. I finally told my sister (the one with twins) and she cried on the phone and begged me not to go through with it. My ex-boyfriend brought the money over for the abortion. We talked some more about what the procedure was and how I would probably feel afterwards. He looked really sad and stated that if he was stable; he would help me with the baby, that is, if I really wanted it.”

“It’s finally a reality that I killed my child, my flesh and blood. I tell my close co-worker (who had an abortion as well) and she told me that I made the decision and I should just pray. To make a long story short, I cried every time I thought about it and especially when I talked to my mom about my nieces and nephew’s Christmas gift. This is a niece or nephew that my siblings will never see, a grandchild that my parents will never know and a child that I will never see grow up.”

….

“I do know that if I ever get pregnant again, I will not have another abortion. It’s just too painful.”

 

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Jane was the name of the underground abortion network that was in place before Roe versus Wade. The feminists who ran the organization employed an abortionist who had no medical license, and later did the abortions themselves despite having no official medical training. While they claimed that their abortions were safe, they did not follow the women after they return to their homes, often many states away.

A teenager who had an abortion said the following to a woman who assisted it and was pregnant:

“The other was a high school student who had had a difficult time during her abortion. Afterword, as Deborah sat with her on the couch in the living room, she collapsed in Deborah’s arms, sobbing , “I killed my baby, but you’ll be a very good mother because you’re taking care of me.”

Deborah was horrified. The counseling session was the place to address these feelings. Hadn’t her counselor talk to her about this? Deborah asked, “If you felt that way, why did you do it?”

“My mother said if I have this baby, she’d see to it that the welfare people take it away from me, so what’s the point.” She hugged Deborah’s belly, “I killed my baby and here’s your baby. I’m glad you helped me, but I wish I could have a baby like you.”

Laura Kaplan The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995)  133

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One woman’s story about her struggles after an abortion:

“While in recovery I asked why I felt so sad. Would it go away? They told me it was relief from all the pressure that I had been under. They gave me something for pain and I fell asleep, crying. I woke up hurting and bleeding heavily. My mom was there. I heard girls crying. I started crying. I slept most of the way home. The abortion was never talked about again. It was like it never happened… The abortion was supposed to fix everything, but it broke me instead. My body was never the same after the abortion… With every pregnancy I went through, I saw my aborted baby in their eyes. I was full of wonder. I was also as pro-choice as you could be, very angry at the ones trying to tell women what they could or couldn’t do with their bodies. That anger and viewpoint validated my abortion. I have searched on the Internet for others who had had abortions.
I wondered if I was the only one hurting like this. I found Silent No More Awareness when it was just starting out. It was the first time I realized I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy.”

Teresa Tomeo Recall Abortion: Ending the Abortion Industry’s Exploitation of Women (Charlotte, North Carolina: St. Benedict Press, 2013)  87 – 88

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“My family would not support my decision to keep my baby. My boyfriend said he would give me no emotional or financial help whatsoever. All the people that mattered told me to abort. When I said I didn’t want to, they started listing reasons why I should. They said it would be detrimental to my career, and my health, and that I would have no social life and no future. But I actually keep it alone? I started feeling like maybe I was crazy to want to keep it.

I finally told everyone that I would have the abortion just to get them off my back. But inside I still didn’t want to have the abortion. Unfortunately, when the abortion day came I shut off my inside feelings. I was scared to not do it because of how my family and boyfriend felt. I’m so angry at myself for giving in to the pressure of others. I just felt so alone in my feelings to have my baby.”

David Reardon, Aborted Women Silent No More P31 quoted in Randy Alcorn “Pro-life Answers to Pro-Choice Arguments” (Sisters, Oregon: Multnomah Publishers, 2000)

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